1955 - A KID FOR TWO FARTHINGS, a fable about 1950's London

 One of England's best directors took on this very delicate story about the lives of people living in an area of London's East End called Petticoat Lane.  The film was shot in very garish color.  Petticoat Lane at the time was populated with Jewish immigrants.  For some reason the film barely gets into this and it's almost impossible to tell that any Jewish people live there and this is a story where the setting is very important to the film.

The story follows a young boy who has been listening to stories from an old tailor.  One story in particular is about a magical unicorn that grants wishes.  The boy  finds a young goat with only one horn and believes it to be be a unicorn.  The story focuses on the boy's fantasy about the goat and how it affects the lives of people living in Petticoat Lane.  We get a body builder who has put off marrying his girlfriend due to lack of money.  The tailor wishing for a steam machine to iron his customer's clothes. The boy's mother waiting for the return of her husband who is working abroad etc.

 

You can't fault the cast of the film.  Celia Johnson one of the mainstays of the British acting establishment plays the mother.  Diana Dors who was considered the British version of Marilyn Monroe gave a very good performance as the girlfriend waiting to get married. A very young actor named Jonathan Ashmore also does very well as the boy with the goat.  One of Carol Reed's strengths as a director was working with actors.  Orson Welles had said that Carol Reed was one of the few directors who really liked actors.

 

I think the problem with this film is that the story is maybe just a little to whimsical for it's own good.  It's also very tough to pull off a story that is told from a child's point of view.  Not to say that the film doesn't have good scenes in it.   But overall it just seems a little lacking.  Still Carol Reed was a superior director and the film for the most part is certainly worth a look.

The screenplay was by Wolf Mankowitz, the running time is 96 minutes.

1963 - THE RUNNING MAN, disappointing thriller from Carol Reed

After being used and abused by Marlon Brando during the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, the director Carol Reed signed on for a thriller which was primarily shot in Spain.  This should have been a film that Reed could have made in his sleep. After all he was the director of The Third Man, Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol.  The Running Man turned out to be a big disappointment.

People on the set of The Running Man spoke about Reed's indecisiveness and for the most part Reed does seem to lose interest in the story.  Most of the film’s running time seems to be spent photographing the Spanish scenery which is stunning.  However taking pretty pictures of the countryside didn't exactly make for much of a story.

Laurence Harvey plays an airplane pilot who stages a plane crash in order for him and his co conspirator wife to cheat the insurance company out of their claim.  Alan Bates is the insurance investigator and Lee Remick is Harvey's wife.  Anyway, while hiding out in Spain and waiting for the insurance payoff, Harvey and Remick travel to much to their surprise run into Bates.  Is Bates on to their scheme or is he just on vacation? 

 

It's a decent enough story but the way Reed tells it he just completely sucks the suspense out of it.  Laurence Harvey does his smarty pants British crook shtick, Lee Remick is gorgeous to look at and she has really blonde hair.  Alan Bates seems to be wandering around in the film with nothing to do.  The film is just completely inert.

 

The Running Man was a big disappointment from Carol Reed whose future films seemed to show a filmmaker who had lost the light and was now bogged down in big, expensive and boring Hollywood films.

John Mortimer wrote the screenplay, the running time is 104 minutes.

1949 - THE THIRD MAN, still one of the best thrillers

For a film that is almost 75 years old, The Third Man is still one of the best thrillers ever made.  This film benefited from a creative group of talents that came together.  The director was Carol Reed. Graham Greene wrote an original script. Robert Krasker was responsible for the excellent black and white photography and of course the film's musical score played only with a zither by Anton Karas contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film.

The cast was one of the best assembled for a film.  Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Orson Welles.  When not directing himself Welles was generally considered kind of a monster to deal with on other people's films.  In this instance Welles apparently behaved himself and responded positively to the direction of Carol Reed who was a rare filmmaker who actually enjoyed working with challenging  actors.

There isn't much more to write about this film.  I've seen it many times on the big screen and on television and it still holds up very well.  The British producer Alexander Korda was an important figure in the history of British cinema and a man of taste.  The American producer was David O Selznick who always tried to overwhelm any production he was involved in with his personality.  In this case Graham Greene and Carol Reed essentially ignored all of Selnick's attempts to influence The Third Man.

 

The running time is 104 minutes, the writer Graham Greene has said that Welles was responsible for the famous "cuckoo clock" speech. 

THE KEY - World War II drama from Carol Reed

Working with Hollywood liberal Carl Foreman,  director Carol Reed moved into bigger budgeted dramas.  The Key is the first of these films.  A World War II drama about British navy tugboats rescuing damaged ships before the Nazi's ship them,  the central conflict in The Key revolves around the Sophia Loren character.

Loren plays the finance of one the deceased tugboat captains.  Before he died he passed the key to their apartment to another captain in order to take care of her if something happened to him.  The end result is that Loren has essentially become a prostitute for a series of men as each one is killed by the German navy.

I doubt when the original author Jan de Hartog wrote this story he pictured the tragic female character being played by Italian sex bomb Sophia Loren which sort of throws off most of the credibility of the character.  Having American actor William Holden playing a Canadian serving with the British just makes a bigger mess of things.  However the whole thing comes down to, who wouldn't pass up the chance to get some action out of Sophia Loren.

In the end, the chief problem with this film is Carl Foreman's script.  Carol Reed has put together the film with his usual skill and taste.  Even if the actors are miscast Reed gets very good performances out of them However the film is disappointing and too long.

134 minutes.

1940, NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH, not a sequel to THE LADY VANISHES

Carol Reed directed this comedy thriller, which used the same leading lady and the same two supporting British boob characters Charters and Caldicott from The Lady Vanishes.  But the film was not a sequel to the Hitchcock film.  Carol Reed was about four years away from hitting his peak period as a filmmaker, the real auteur's of this film were the writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder who had written The Lady Vanishes and were none to happy that Hitchcock got most of the credit for that film.

This is a very 1930's film with a lot of plot.  The basic story is about the Nazi's capturing an important scientist and his daughter from the British, and a British spy's attempts to get them back.  It is a pretty dated but clever story, with the writers mixing in comedy and suspense.  The film uses a lot of model and miniature work which gives  the whole thing a kind of quaint charm.

The acting is very good with a young Rex Harrison standing out as the British master spy trying to save the scientist and his daughter.  Harrison gets to sing a couple of music hall songs and really hams it up in disguise as a Nazi officer, in a lot of ways he's the whole show.  Margaret Lockwood gets the very thankless role of the daughter of the scientist but she looks pretty good in that English actress kind of way.

The finale features a shoot out on a cable car between Harrison and the Nazis which is a combination of more miniatures and rear projection, yeah it looks pretty phony but it's a lot of silly fun. 

Carol Reed was a very talented director but at this stage in his career he was no Hitchcock, he just didn't seem to be able to stage this spy stuff the way "The Master of Suspense" could.  Reed always liked working with actors and he did get pretty good performances out of the cast but visually the film is pretty dull for the most part. In 1944, Carol Reed kicks it into gear and has a very impressive run of films for the next 10 years. 

An entertaining if rather unmemorable film, proabably best to stick with Hitchcock's British thrillers instead.  The running time is 95 minutes.

1945 - THE TRUE GLORY

Garson Kanin and Carol Reed supervised this World War II documentary, which starts with the Normandy invasion by the Allies and ends with the fall of Berlin. 

The documentary takes film footage from combat cameramen and supplements it with voice over narrations from soldiers, sailors, clerks, generals, nurses etc.  The goal was to provide an overview of every aspect of the invasion.

Besides the involvement of Garson Kanin and Carol Reed,  Paddy Chayefsky was one of the writers and Russ Meyer of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and Vixen! fame was one of the photographers.

 

The film is only 85 minutes long and in many ways gives the viewer a better sense of World War II then the 14 hour Ken Burns PBS documentary and without the pledge drive breaks.

1959 - OUR MAN IN HAVANA has a great Alec Guinness performance but movie is a little to smart for it's own good

A comedy thriller from Graham Greene and Carol Reed who had made The Third Man. This is a very clever spy film but probably a little to subtle for a mass audience entertainment.

 

British Intelligence needs an agent in Cuba. They recruit a vacuum cleaner salesman named Wormold to spy for them. Wormold is given a code name that ends in 005 amusingly enough and realizes rather quickly he doesn't have a clue what to do as a spy. He pulls out the Havana phone book, randomly picks some names out of the book and starts making up reports to send to British Intelligence in London. Soon "the other side" realizes the British have a new agent in Cuba and send an assassination team out to kill him and his list of agents. Remember this is a comedy.

Graham Greene and Carol Reed are top professionals. The dialog is good, the acting is very good and the on location filming in Cuba literally while the revolution was going on is pretty cool. However the film is so clever and subtle in it's tone and humor, it works against the enjoyment of the film. The understated nature of the story is kind of interesting to watch unfold and when the story gets serious and the violence comes it is kind of surprising.

Carol Reed always got great performances out of actors, apparently he was a director who actually liked his actors, unlike Hitchcock or David Lean. All the acting is good but this film has an amazing performance by Alec Guinness. Playing the vacuum cleaner salesman who goes from being a wimp to a cold blooded killer seems perfectly in character the way Guinness approaches the role.

 Love the name on that sign by the way.

111 minutes.

1953 - THE MAN BETWEEN, A Carol Reed Production

Carol Reed  a talented filmmaker was strong in the suspense genre like Hitchcock. Unlike Hitchcock,  Reed showed an empathy for his characters which Hitchcock struggled with throughout his career. Reed made lots of good movies like Odd Man Out, Outcast of the Islands, The Fallen Idol, The True Glory and The Third Man.

The general rap on him is that he had issues finding the right scripts later in his career. Films from that period were The Key, Trapeze, Our Man in Havana and The Agony and the Ecstasy. Whatever the problems and faults in these later films, they had a fundamental decency which, isn't seen much in modern storytelling anymore. He won an Academy Award for directing Oliver, which is not a film I like but is very well made.

Kind of a follow up to The Third man, The Man Between,  isn't his best film and does have some major  problems.   Its slow moving at times and has a somewhat weak script.  It does have James Mason and a cast of very good actors performing at a high degree of skill.   Filmed on location in postwar Germany, The Man Between still has many fine scenes of suspense and action

A cold war film about innocent people being exploited by gangsters in divided Berlin. The character that James Mason plays is extremely conflicted.  At one point he exploits his ex wife for his own interests and then works to redeem his behavior during the last part of the film.  

Again, not Carol Reed's best film but well worth watching.

100 minutes screenplay by Harry Kurnitz.